Leonardo RD's blog

Last week's changes

2010-08-17

Last week's changes

This last week I have made a few changes to the code, and I thought it would be good to make one post to talk a little about them.

First and most important, I found a problem with the demo application (not exactly a bug, more of a map misbehavior). If you plot a path going from the stairs in the basement01 sector to the basement03 sector, near the basement-dungeon sector, the path is likely to go below the stairs and through a wall. After careful examination, I realized this was actually caused by some parts of navigation meshes that were created below the stairs, due to the level geometry. Since Detour searches for the polygon nearest to the path's starting point, one of the polygons in this disconnected piece of mesh was being chosen, which caused the problem. In order to fix this, I altered the portal's polygon position for the portals that connect basement01 and basement03 in the world xml file, moving them up a little (the portal polygons were going below the stair level).
Here is the modified world file: link.

Second, I changed the DebugRender methods to return a list of csSimpleRenderMesh instead of drawing the structures directly using OpenGL. Notice that now you don't have to (read you shouldn't) call those methods every frame, only when the structure being drawn changes (you have to ask the iGraphics3D plugin to draw the meshes every frame, however).

Finally, I added another hotkey to the pathfindingtest application. Upon pressing 't', a path will be calculated between two predetermined points. This path will then be compared to a path previously calculated, and an error message will be displayed if they differ. If the paths are equal, nothing will happen.